1. Introduction
In todays service oriented IT zero downtime becomes more and more a most wanted feature. This article will show you what SUSE Linux Enterprise can do for you to achieve this. One way is the use of high availability clusters.
A second approach is the idea to patch the running software without the need of stopping it. This what live patching does for you. Imagine that a security issue is found in the Linux kernel and you are forced to update your systems in order to stay compliant or simply because of staying secure. That means downtime to your service.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching (or just Live Patching) helps you to avoid these downtimes. This means also that you will save money at the end of the day, because your critical business applications can run with out interruption due to software maintenance.
To make this happen you need the SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching subscription. As of today this enables you to patch your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Linux kernels while running e.g. SAP HANA without the need to shut SAP HANA down and reboot your server, which can take a serious amount of time if you consider the length of the reboot cycle and the time until all data is loaded back into memory.